The robot skin placement problem: a new technique to place triangular modules inside polygons

Abstract

Providing robots with large-scale robot skin is a challenging goal, especially when considering surfaces characterised by different shapes and curvatures. The problem originates from technological advances in tactile sensing, and in particular from two requirements: (i) covering the largest possible area of a robot’s surface with tactile sensors to be able to detect accidental or purposive contacts, and (ii) doing it using cheap, replicable hardware modules to keep production and manufacturing costs low. Given modules of a specific shape, the problem of optimally placing them requires to maximise the number of modules that can be fixed on the selected robot body part. Differently from previous approaches, which are based on methods inspired by computational geometry (e.g. packing), we propose a novel layout design method inspired by physical insights, referred to as Iterative Placement (ItPla), which arranges modules as if physical forces acted on them. A number of case studies from the literature are considered to evaluate the proposed approach.